How MasterG is encouraging female participation in the fashion world

It was when Gayatri Jolly made the switch from business to fashion that she finally felt at home. “This is where I belong,” she realised on day one of her fashion degree program at the Parsons School of Design in New York. That feeling of contentment—of home—is what drives her work, and what led to her founding an all-female training program/factory called Master G upon her return to India.

“What my design education did for me, that’s what I want Master G to do for the girls,” says Jolly over the phone from her home in New Delhi. “It fundamentally changed me. I had so many mental blocks about how I was supposed to live my life, despite my access and exposure. And I began to think: so what’s happening to women who don’t even have that exposure?”

Design is a male-dominated industry in India, led by “masterjis” who have been conditioned to believe that women are incapable of skills like pattern-making. A lack of confidence in women’s abilities, the absence of a support structure that offers them anything beyond marriage and motherhood, and the denied access to education, has led to generations of Indian women being held back from achieving any real independence.

Enter Master G. Launched by Jolly in 2015, the training program equips women and young girls with the design skills required to hold a job and earn a decent wage in safe and respectful working conditions. “It can change the way these women think,” says Jolly. “Design is a tool for breaking mental patterns; it’s not just a physical skill but changes the way you think. It has helped these women go home and begin to question why things are the way they are.”

In the three years since Master G’s launch, the factory has worked with labels like Doodlage and NorBlack NorWhite for their production needs, and is now lending its workforce to its own in-house label, Heimat. “It closed the loop,” says Jolly of this recent move. “It’s a market-driven approach instead of something charity-driven. Charity doesn’t last. You give something today and it’s gone tomorrow.” Now, as Heimat launches its first collection, we catch up with Jolly to learn more about the brand and the factory behind it.

Tell us a bit more about how Master G works

To scale up MasterG training programs and reach women digitally, we’re launching digital training modules—kind of like Coursera in regional languages. We’re executing the program through NGO partners who roll it out in the community with posters and banners, and we go from home to home to convince families to send their girls to us. Around the time when admissions begin, I have to drink 20 cups of really sweet chai every day.

At the end of the program, girls either apply for jobs (with designers or export houses), start shops with one or two machines in their community, or become teachers and start a centre of their own. Some girls go on to teach at other centres too. They learn how to use smartphones as an educational tool so they can navigate the industry; they even post their garments on Instagram and sell them online.

What does Heimat mean?

It’s a German word that means belonging, the feeling of home. You meet a really old friend after a long time for coffee—that feeling of home. You can create that ‘heimat’ wherever you go when you have that highest potential inside of you. Heimat is a word that came to me in 2007 when I was in college and it stuck with me. I’m obsessed with the idea of what home means. It’s something I thought about a lot when volunteering with women at NGOs in Delhi’s slums, who didn’t have a home that was a nurturing environment.

What made you decide to launch an in-house label?

I was debating this for a long time. Having our own brand gives us the validation to be trainers in the field. If I’m selling in the industry and people are paying for the product, it shows that we’re not teaching in a vacuum. We’re walking the walk, not just preaching. If we can be a profitable brand, that means this is a working model for the industry. And when they see that this is a running business… that’s the only way to fundamentally disrupt the existing system.

Tell us about Heimat’s first collection

It’s functional, comfortable and fairly minimal, although there’s some embroidery—the garments are embroidered with an aerial view of the topography of the slums where these girls come from, and the colours are also inspired by the architecture of where these girls live. The bright blue we call ‘tirpal blue’ comes from the plastic of Dharavi. ‘Asbestos grey’ is named for the asbestos sheets covering their roofs. Washed brick, moss green, jamun—all these colours are picked up from their living habitat. I spent so many years in the slums. There’s a beauty in the haphazardness of their homes that’s so striking that I had to base the first collection on that.

Did this process highlight any facts about the gender imbalance in Indian fashion?

One thing I learned is that there’s this blanket belief that ‘ladkiyan pattern nahi bana sakti.’ It’s the way khandaani darzis work—daughters don’t feature in that tradition. It’s fathers and sons. Masterji is the person who cuts patterns, and nowhere in India was that being done by women. It’s a systemic thing, a mental block. It has little to do with the actual skill, and more with how women are viewed by their families. There’s nothing so complicated that women can’t do it. It’s being done in our factory—they learn pattern-making and sewing and technical design here.

What has the process of hiring and training an all-female team been like?

It’s been phenomenal. The kind of transformation I’ve seen in these girls is a constant inspiration. They are girls who have the toughest circumstances, who come to work and know they can make a better life for themselves. Every day I go to work and there’s a new girl, a new story, a new milestone. This is why I jump out of bed each day. It makes it all worth it.

Scroll through the gallery below to take a look at some of Heimat’s latest offerings.

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